New EFF Tool Makes Emailing Congress Just a Few Clicks Away

San Francisco, California (EFF) – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created a new tool that makes emailing your congressional lawmakers a quick and easy process. Democracy.io simplifies and streamlines the current fractured system for contacting lawmakers, allowing you to message your two senators and your representative from a single website.

“Democracy thrives when the voices of Internet users are heard in Washington. The easier it is for you to reach your member of Congress, the better,” said EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman. “With Democracy.io, you can send one message to both your senators and your representative right away, instead of tracking down three different forms on three different websites. We are proud to open this tool to the public and increase lawmakers’ awareness of how their constituents really feel.”

At Democracy.io, you enter your home address, and a quick look-up provides the names of your three congressional lawmakers. You then can choose any or all of those lawmakers, and send them whatever message you’d like. Democracy.io follows best practices for protecting the privacy of users, and all of the code is licensed under the AGPL, which means people can create new versions with different features. EFF does not control or influence the messages sent through Democracy.io.

“Being able to contact your elected representatives is a critical component of a healthy democracy. Making sure that it’s a simple and rewarding process should be one of Congress’s priorities, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to even be on their radar,” said EFF Tech Fellow Sina Khanifar. “Advocacy organizations that can afford it have long had access to tools for delivering bulk constituent messages, but those solutions are expensive for regular citizens. Democracy.io helps to fill in that gap by giving people an easy way to have their voices are heard in Washington. Hopefully the tool will also remind lawmakers that they can and should be building sites like these already.”

“Uscapitolindaylight” by Kevin McCoy.

EFF wrote the backend system that delivers the messages to Congress with inspiration from work by the Participatory Politics Foundation. Delivery is made possible by the open source “contact-congress” dataset that was started by the Sunlight Foundation and completed with help from over 100 EFF volunteer web developers. The dataset is now maintained by EFF, the Sunlight Foundation, and Action Network.

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